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“Different case. She did it to get a confession.” Flynn’s voice was clipped.
Jo struggled to keep her face impassive. It wasn’t illegal to lie to a defendant in an interrogation, in fact, it was a fairly common, if controversial, practice. But producing a faked confession and putting it in a case file was pushing a different line altogether. “And that’s when you went to the chief operations officer?”
“No. That’s when she retaliated against me. Not only her, but the other prosecutors in the office. And once they started retaliating against me,that’swhen I reported everything, including the detective who faked the confession.” She stabbed her pen in the air to accentuate the word.
“How did she retaliate?” Jo asked.
“Barely spoke to me when she didn’t have to. Left me dangling completely on my own, an impossible place to be.” Anger flashed through her eyes. “Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do? Call out prosecutors and detectives who are getting too jaded and cynical to do their job correctly?”
Jo noted Arnett’s posture tense, and purposefully softened her expression. “You were trying to do what you believed was right.”
Flynn relaxed slightly, leaning back against her chair. “Thank you. And to be clear—I do believe Sandra thought hers was the best way to get justice.”
“But?” Arnett asked.
Flynn stood up. “But the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
CHAPTERNINE
As soon as Sandra hit the ground, the clock had started ticking. There’d be no turning back now until it was all finished.
The gunshot would be hard for anyone to locate precisely, but I couldn’t count on that giving me more than a few minutes. Between the dim light and my ski mask, anyone scanning the area with binoculars would have only the most generic of descriptions for the police, but I couldn’t risk some good Samaritan showing up to intervene—something just ironic enough to happen.
So I had to push down what I was feeling and act. Gun in pocket, gloves snapped on.
I posed the arms first. Both out to the side, one palm toward the lake, one toward the road. Then I grabbed a hank of hair from the side that wasn’t bleeding, lifted her head, yanked the blindfold down over her wide, open, blindly staring eyes.
I allowed myself a moment to take in the sight of her, and stored the picture in my memory, next to the snapshot of the fear on her face.
Then away back to the trees, removing the gloves and shoving them into the Ziploc left from the blindfold. I snatched down the two cameras I’d hidden, then bolted up, over the hill and down again into the non-existent traffic.
Only then, in the car and safely down the road, could I allow myself a moment to take everything in.
I’d played it out in my head a hundred times beforehand. Picturing the expression on her face. Imagining how it would feel to pull the trigger. In my simulations, I never once felt the remotest sense of hesitation, but that was no guarantee. I’d never killed anyone before, so I couldn’t know what I’d actually feel when the moment came.
I read about it once, how soldiers react the first time they have to shoot the enemy. Some freeze, unable to pull the trigger even if it means they’ll be killed. Some manage to force themselves but spend their lives agonizing over it, pouring alcohol or drugs or sex on top of a guilt they can never quite bury. Still others never think twice about it, before, during, or after. It’s nearly impossible to predict who will do what, the article said.
So the most nerve-wracking thing about killing her was not knowing what would happen when I came face to face with her. Would I freeze up, unable to pull the trigger? Would I kill her, but be instantly filled with remorse? Or would I feel nothing?
But I didn’t feel any of those things. What I felt was alive—more alive than I’d ever felt in my life. Like a weight had been lifted off of me that allowed me to breathe again.
It killed me to stay below the speed limit on my way out of town—I wanted the car to fly along with my spirit, happy and free and energized for the next steps of the journey I’d just embarked on. I flipped on the radio and found a happy upbeat song and let loose, singing off-key at the top of my lungs. I pictured the police arriving, taking in the scene I’d left for them, trying to figure out the significance of it all. It killed me not to be able to leave a clear, bold declaration for them about what was happening and why—but I just couldn’t risk them putting all the pieces together before I saw the whole thing through.
In the meantime, I smiled like a teenager in love, wondering if he’d be at the scene, stumbling blindly through the field of clues, completely unaware of what was coming for him.
CHAPTERTEN
Jo’s phone rang as they buckled themselves back into the car.
“Hayes,” she said to Arnett, then connected the call.
“Fournier, Arnett,” Hayes said. “The press are hounding me for a statement and I can’t put it off much longer. What do we have?”
Jo caught her up on Bruce Ashville, Mitch Hauptmann, and Patricia Flynn, then summarized. “Three suspects, two so far with no alibis.”
“I can’t give any of that to the press without evidence. At the lake, you made it sound like you thought the killer was someone she’d prosecuted.”
She rubbed her eyes. “We’re on our way back to HQ to work through her case files now.”
